Incident 113: Facebook's AI Put "Primates" Label on Video Featuring Black Men

Description: Facebook's AI mislabeled video featuring Black men as a video about "primates," resulting in an offensive prompt message for users who watched the video.

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Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Black people and Facebook users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
113
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2020-06-27
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts 'Primates' Label on Video of Black Men
nytimes.com · 2021

Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates,” causing the company to investigate …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.